aworks :: "new" american classical music

Nuvoletta, Op. 25 (1947). Samuel Barber

Judith Kellock sang in an all-Barber program yesterday at Old First Church in San Francisco. Nuvoletta, from Finnegan's Wake, was the final number and it gave Kellock a chance to really perform.

Oh, how it was duusk!
From Vallee Maraia to Grasyaplainia,
dormimust echo!
A dew! Ah dew! It was so duusk
that the tears of night beagn to fall,
first by ones and twos,
then by threes and fours,
at last by fives and sixes of sevens,
for the tired ones were wecking,
as we weep now with them.
O! O! O! Par la pluie! . . .

Accompanied by Blaise Bryski on piano, she sang various other songs:

• Four Songs, Op. 13 - Agee, Yeats, et al.
• Melodies Passageres, Op. 27 - Rilke
• Two Songs, Op. 18 - Horan, Villa
• Three Songs Op. 10 - Joyce
• Three Songs, Op. 2 - Stephens, Housman
• Despite and Still, Op. 41 - Graves, Roethke, Joyce

The second Three Songs was particularly dramatic, both in voice and piano.

Disclaimer: I can't speak for the first three songs as I was inexplicably late to the concert. Argh.

Coming Together (1971). Frederic Rzewski

Pete Dako prefers Frederic Rzewski's Attica to his Coming Together and quotes a Robert Christgau review:

The design of "Coming Together" is simple, even minimal: Steve ben Israel reads and rereads one of Sam Melville's letters from Attica over a jazzy, repetitious vamp. Yet the result is political art as expressive and accessible as Guernica...

Coming Together was recorded on the recent Ear Unit CD.  I actually prefer a nineties CD recording of the piece. However, I cannot place the CD and have not found it on the web; maybe it was on Wergo and features a German or Eastern European voice reading the letter?

In any case, Donna McCabe analyzes the piece and gives more about Sam Melville including that his original name was Samuel Grossman and that he was convicted of the 1969 Manhattan bombings, which were politically inspired.  She discusses the sense of "timelessness" in the work.

The beginning of Melville's text:

I think the combination of age and a greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time. it's six months now, and I can tell you truthfully few periods in my life have passed so quickly. I am  in excellent physical and emotional health. There are doubtless subtle surprises ahead, but I feel secure and ready...

The Ear Unit liner notes state that he was one of the organizers of the Attica, New York prison riots later that year, when he was killed.

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  Update: Tower Classical Annex had the other recording in stock: Group 180 on Hungaroton with Péter Forgács as the "reciter."  Amazon Real sample.

Nixon in China (1985-87). John Adams /st. louis/

Reviews re: the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis production of John Adams' Nixon in China:

First done 17 years ago and a witness since to the swift life and death of a host of forgettable American operas (some here in St. Louis), "Nixon in China" thrives. The approachable musical language is inviting, but it is the wistful ambiguity that provides lasting attraction: the awe and the ridiculousness of great events, the intertwining of public and domestic lives, the deep personal sadnesses lying just below the surface of political triumphs. We keep bringing "Nixon" back for the same reason we watch "The Sopranos" on television: the horrible and the absurd are indistinguishable. Bernard Holland. New York Times.

It is difficult to comment meaningfully on the singers' vocalism, because Adams mandated that they be miked, despite the intimacy of the theatre. The effect was to make all voices of a size, to remove vocal focus and to introduce a decided artificiality to the overall sound. Sarah Bryan Miller.  Financial Times.

Most minimalist classical music is boring, pretentious crap. Among the millions of words written about this modern school of classical music, one word is conspicuously missing: beautiful. The surprise, then, about Opera Theatre of Saint Louis' production of modern minimalist composer John Adams' 1987 opera Nixon in China, is that it's mostly a night of shimmering, exhilarating, sometimes overwhelmingly beautiful music. Lew Prince. Riverfront Times.

Driven by baritone Robert Orth's sensational portrayal of Richard Nixon, the St. Louis production revels in the intimate, deeply human side of Nixon in China, not the grand spectacle that was so important to HGO's premiere. Charles Ward. Houston Chronicle.

Synopsis.  Official overview. Overview from US Opera. Future performances (Minneapolis, Portland). Real audio stream from the original CD. Technical specification. Wikipedia stub. 1988 review. Previous aworks post.

For John Cage (1982), for violin and piano. Morton Feldman

In Larry Sitsky's Music of the Twentieth-Century: A Biocritical Sourcebook, Jonathan Kramer offers that Morton Feldman was a modernist, but may or may not have been an avant-gardist. By his definition, a modernist is producing "art for art's sake", with an emphasis on elitism. An avant-gardist on the other hand is trying to provoke the conventional music world, often in a brash and aggressive manner, and where reaching a larger audience helps the cause. In the case of Feldman, independent of any aspirations of a broader audience, his music may be the opposite of aggressive, which in turn might have been a way of challenging the status quo given the norms of late twentieth-century art music.

I am listening to the performance of Feldman's For John Cage by Paul Zukofsky and Marianne Schroeder. From an abstract of a paper, Catherine Costello Hirata (who also authored the Feldman entry in Sitsky's book) writes:

On the largest scale, Morton Feldman's For John Cage (1982) for violin and piano is shaped by the contrast between passages which adhere rather strictly to the form 'aa . . .bb . . . cc' -- where each letter stands for what I will term a musical figure (usually comprised of but a handful of notes)-and passages which exhibit looser or more elaborate constructions...

And by the way, John Cage is clearly a member of the avant-garde, but even he has music that transcends the avant-garde ghetto; for me, his percussion music, his prepared piano music, or his simple piano music.

Harmonielehre for Orchestra (1984-5). John Adams

Hipstomp reports on free summer concerts in New York. On four consecutive nights of American classical music starting July 13th, David Robertson will lead the New York Philharmonic with concerts in Brooklyn, Central Park, Queens and the Bronx. The program consists of Ives' Variations on America (arranged by William Schuman), Barber's Violin Concerto, and Adams' Harmonielehre.

• New York Philharmonic program notes on Variations and some other Ives's works (PDF).
• San Francisco Symphony's stream of Harmonielehre (Real Audio) via American Mavericks.

Piano Concerto (1928). Henry Cowell

This is definitely a piano concerto, definitely an experimental modernist work circa the 1920s, and definitely written by Henry Cowell. To give you some sense, the movements are titled "Polyharmony," "Tone Cluster," and "Counter Rhythm." Written with Cowell's usual clarity, it doesn't require repeated listening to parse the musical syntax, compared to say, Carter or Boulez. Still, the end result is a piece of music that sounds as if it was written for a parallel musical universe, familiar but yet alien. I find myself intrigued by it, without even particularly liking it. Would those early twentieth-century modernists call that a success?

Recently, Kyle Gann blogged about the end of modernism and how the literary world has moved on:

The literary people are ahead of us, and I look forward to a music world in which we can all discuss modernism as a limited worldview from the historical past that we too have learned to transcend.

American Mavericks has a full Real Audio stream of a version by the San Francisco Symphony. I expect to continue listening to the Litwin recording, even if the artistic movement that inspired Cowell's Piano Concerto has expired.

Smile (Modern Times) (1936). Charlie Chaplin

Last month I was in Los Angeles and today in San Francisco.  Now it's time to see how the two cities stack up for record shoppers, in this case, based on visits to Amoeba Records and Tower Classical Cloister, er, Annex, in both cities.

Let's start with the weather.  It was 63 degrees, windy and foggy in SF. Advantage LA.

Parking was easy except for Amoeba/SF where parking in the Haight is always a hassle.  Advantage LA.

In a huge building, the atmosphere at Amoeba/LA was professional if a bit subdued ("Electronica, call on line six") and jazz and classical were segregated in their own room. I found myself lost in what appeared to be a rock section where I neither recognized the artists nor even the genre.  At Tower/LA, I was the only customer and the clerk was jabbering on the phone.  Tower/SF was the most sophisticated; a shopper and the clerk were discussing the differences between English, German and French...were they comparing styles of oboes, oboists, or oboe music?  I didn't want to interrupt their conversation to ask. Amoeba/SF was a mob scene, in a fun kind of way, as Most Chill Slackmob were playing a spirited, loud in-store appearance for their Urban Mind Expansion CD:

Most Chill Slackmob is a rugged, live band that throws down rump-shakin, block-rockin parties. This San Francisco created Los Angeles based crew fuses the influences of hip hop, raw funk and dub to create a universal sound.

I did wonder if the older guy next to me browsing the Brahms bin enjoyed the program much.  Advantage SF for Amoeba being cloister-free.

The drive from Amoeba to Tower in LA on Sunset Boulevard through Hollywood is exciting and colorful (I described it here).  The drive from Amoeba to Tower in SF via Pacific Heights has several spectacular views of San Francisco Bay.  Also, it was amusing to see cars lined up for blocks on the straight, boring side of Lombard Street waiting for the opportunity to drive down the crooked side. Advantage SF.

As for actual purchases, I bought the most by far at Amoeba/LA and lesser amounts at Amoeba/SF and Tower/SF. To be fair, I was so satiated from Amoeba/LA that by the time I got to Tower/LA I even passed on the new Michael Jon Fink single. No advantage.

Most important, I counted the "Adams Number" for each store.  When I go into a record store, I head for the John Adams bin and count the number of CDs  (note that the multi-volume Adams Earbox only counts as one).  This number serves several purposes: as an Adams completist, I need to know if there are any CDs I don't have; based on that, I gauge the budget left for other purposes; finally, the Adams Number serves as a proxy for the rest of the shopping experience, since it correlates with the amount of both traditional and contemporary music in stock.  The typical Best Buy has an Adams Number of zero or one, the local library is four or five, Tower/LA was sixteen, Amoeba/SF was seventeen (disappointing this Bay Area loyalist), Tower/SF was eighteen and Amoeba/LA was 36. Advantage LA

Ok, overall, a slight preference for LA even if we did beat their soccer team in the greatest Major League Soccer  game. 

After all this shopping, the surprise track from my cornucopia of new CDs is violinist Leila Josefowicz playing Smile from the Charlie Chaplin movie Modern Times.  The work is short, serene, and poignant; the violin and piano arrangement by jazz composer Claus Ogermann.  I found the CD at Amoeba/SF in the bargain bins for $1.99.  It turns out this piece has also been recorded by Perlman, I Salonisti, Kunzel, Kremer et al.  I never knew.  Josefowicz I did know from her playing of Adams' Violin Concerto. Amazon samples.

36!

À la chinoise (1918). Leo Ornstein

I was looking for my Alan Feinberg The American Innovator CD to hear another version of Cowell's Exultation that I blogged about earlier this week. I was sidetracked by the first piece on that CD; Leo Ornstein's interesting À la chinoise. Ornstein was a Russian American, a contemporary of Charles Ives, and an outstanding pianist in addition to being a composer. He is noted for being one of the first American modernist musicians although for various reasons, he went from prodigy to notoriety to obscurity.

The stereotype for headache-inducing music is Philip Glass but between the swirling arpeggios and chromaticism, this work, while interesting, makes Glass sound stable and soothing. In addition to the Feinberg recording, which is a fine CD overall, I have a version on BIS by Jenny Lin among a collection of European and American classical music (Busoni, Gould, Martinu et al) with Chinese/pentatonic roots. Coincidentally, both CDs also include John Adams' China Gates.

Ornstein wrote this piece after his first visit to San Francisco's Chinatown. The Database for American Recorded Music says that Ornstein also arranged an orchestral version for Leopold Stokowski. I won't be seeking that out although I would like to hear some of his other notorious compositions as well as the work he wrote when he was ninety-eight. Maybe the secret to longevity as illustrated by Ornstein and Elliott Carter is to write challenging music?

Sample by Mark-Andre Hamelin. PDF score.

The work is circa 1918 and the title is sometimes capitalized as English.

Exultation (1919). Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell's Exultation is a short piece for piano, one which uses "clusters" of notes for full impact. That full impact was presumably with body parts beyond just the hands. So when the right hand plays a much lighter melody in contrast to the crashing, emphatic chords, that too gives surprising depth. From liner notes on The Database of Recorded American Music:

Complexity and simplicity, radical "noise" and catchy modal tunes, these disparate elements are here combined by the sure hand of Cowell into a jubilant piece of Americana.

Epitonic has MP3 and stream. I'm listening to the live Chris Brown recording on the New Albion CD.

What's Next? (1997). Elliott Carter

I'll admit to having a phobia about new Elliott Carter works.  While some of them prove to be worthy, it takes considerable effort to assimilate the music.  This places Carter on the Cecil Taylor/Anthony Braxton end of the art/entertainment spectrum.  In the case of What's Next?, I have seen the CD but haven't yet had the courage to take it on.  Even after reading a review on Bagatallen and his comments on assessing the performance, I'm doubtful:

In discussing the performance of a work as obviously difficult as What Next? I want to stress that I have not seen the score, and, even if I had one handy, would need to take a tremendous amount of time and trouble before I could comfortably make any assertions regarding accuracy. Anyone can hear, however, the beauty of tone of both singers and instrumentalists as well as the apparent effortlessness of the production.

And yet, Bagatallen on the composer: 

Carter has always been an intellectual’s intellectual, ever refining his page-long algorithms, consistently offering layer upon layer of meaning for those interested in diving deep. Even so, he has never sacrificed the beautiful to the lesser divinities of the intricate or the cerebral. His priorities have invariably been flawless. As a result, Elliott Carter of the most prolific creators of profoundly beautiful art—not only of our time, but of any time.

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Update: Forgot the "?" in the title.  I blame it all on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.